Friday, March 18, 2011

You see, Jason is all about the Christian love. Over the course of his scores of comments on Main Street Plaza over 10 days or so, he said things like this (just assume a "sic" everywhere):

Love the sinnger HATE the sin, i dont hate any of you gays on this blogg, we could even be friends

But as weird as this may sound i do in some weird way love all of you even though you make think im a little crazy

love the sinner not the sin. Ive had friends who were gay and if a gay friend came up to me id give him a big hug.

what do i think of black people? I love them

people like me are just devistated cause once the spirit enters us it makes us love everyone poeple we dont even know

Not saying i dont love liberals also

I know none of you will believe this but i love all of you. no i do not know you personaly but i know that when one has love in his heart he can do nothing but love his fellow brothers and sisters.

I am required by God to love everyone including my enemies and to treat them as myself.

I hate the sin, but love you the sinner.

ya know what, yea I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU , I LOVE YOU, and so does Jesus Christ capital J and God capital G

Isn't that special? Jason just lurves everyone, because he's so filled with the spirit.

Seth was Jason's chief interlocutor during that long, long thread. He treated Jason as if he were a normal person, one who would listen to arguments, answer questions, and, you know, see reason. Bless his heart. Jason is obviously capable of none of those things.

Now, Seth is thoroughly Mormon -- a bit heterodox in places maybe, but a believing, practicing Mormon. In Jason's eyes, though, Seth is an "appeaser of sin" because he doesn't get as excited as Jason does about homosexuality. And in Jason's farewell message to MSP, after denouncing the rest of us as sinners, he had some special words for Seth:

the comming spiritual war more then likely will be physical as well and i hope for your sake your not standing across the field against me cause im headed for the apeasers first. So long

Get that? Basically Jason is saying, "I hope I have a chance to kill you someday." Crazy. That came less than two hours after he wrote that "I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU, I LOVE YOU" thing. Double crazy. Obviously, Jason doesn't know what love is.

All that's amusing enough, but can we learn anything from it (besides that Jason is a nut)? Well, Jason is the poster boy for the Dunning-Kruger effect. Among the things Jason clearly thinks he's good at are thinking, research, argumentation, writing, and spirituality. On that MSP thread, he obviously thought he was winning every argument and that he was pursuing a strategy that could "win souls." Unfortunately, he's tremendously incompetent at every one of those things, so much so that he's incapable of realizing how incompetent he is.

I think we can add "love" to the list of things Jason is incompetent at. He's so bad at the whole "love your fellow man" thing that he doesn't know he's not doing it right. Jason's love is a Dunning-Kruger love.

That's also amusing enough, but it got me thinking. How is Jason's love different from the Christian god's love? Think about it.

Jason: "I love you, I love you, I love you! I hope I have a chance to kill you someday."

God: "I love you more than you can imagine. Obey me or I'll let you be tortured for eternity."

Do you see a difference?

Obviously, God doesn't know what love is. He's so bad at it that he doesn't even know he's not doing it right. Or the people who interpret God's love don't know. Or the people who invented the concept. Whichever. In any event, God's love is a Dunning-Kruger love.